Surveymama’s Weblog

The survey has been running for just over two weeks now, and I want to say a big THANK YOU to everyone who has communicated directly with me either by email, through this blog, or through comments at the end of the survey. If you asked me to contact you regarding results, rest assured you will hear from me before the end of the summer, or by the early fall at the latest. I just have to finish my degree before Thanksgiving, when my second child is due.

A number of you have suggested alternate sites for reaching eligible moms. Thank you also! There is only one problem with this, and it is a big one that I dealt with for over a year while designing this study. My thesis committee required that I draw my response population from a somewhat unified source — aka, Brain Child. On my own, I think I would have gone for more than one source simultaneously, but it is my hope that BC, with a national readership exceeding 30,000, will give me a good number and diverse geographic representation.

If I had been able to conduct the survey completely on my own (and who knows, at some point in the future I may do just that, a re-do exactly to my liking, using all of the wonderful mom sources I have collected), I think I would have spread the survey out far and wide, and encouraged moms who completed it to forward it to their friends.

That said….if you enjoyed filling out the survey and are friends with other moms who are also Brain Child readers, would you write them and encourage them to visit? Here is the full link:

https://catalysttools.washington.edu/webq/survey/rotherm/47788

I ask because I actually am slightly concerned with response rates. No matter how many (or how few) of you participate, I know I will be able to gain important information and complete my thesis. But my ability to publish the final numbers, and to get them out there with any level of confidence would require that I have at least a few hundred respondents. There’s still time (I hope to keep the survey up until the end of July), and I’d love it if you could help me.

Last, but not least, I’d like to thank everyone who provided so much detail in response to the last question — filling me in on your lives. When I was testing the survey with my friends, I found that most of them really wanted the opportunity to say even a bit more after completing a survey that, for all its hopeful relevance, is still an impersonal and detached instrument. Hearing from all of you also makes me feel a heck of a lot less alone; both right now and retroactively, over the ~2 years I’ve devoted to getting this project underway. Here are some of the things you have told me:

“I often feel like I want to go back to work, but there is no such thing as a meaningful part time job anymore. I wish my husband and I could each work part time so we could both have a good balance between work & family.”

“I got a chuckle out of the “past week question”. It was an extremely stressful week. Our son was diagnosed with Asperger’s on Monday, Tuesday my husband left for a 4 day business trip leaving me with three kids under 4. Wednesday my mother in-law and his aunt arrived for a 4 day stay! Ain’t it great to be a mom ! Good Luck with your work.”

“[snippet] The lack of high-quality, affordable childcare in this country is as deplorable as the lack of across-the-board paid maternity leave. When I go out for a meal with other mothers–even if it’s only for an hour–it’s like we’re escapees from a prison. We do almost nothing other than care for our children and work (be it in the home, out of the home, or some mishmash of the two).”

I’ll sign out for now. Thank you all again — you’re making me feel great about doing this work.

Caitlin

And, the survey is online, the ad is in Brain Child magazine (released May 28), and Brain Child has placed a linking ad on its web site.

If you tried to link to the survey through the BC web site and could not find the ad, I’m sorry. They rotate their ads on the site and sometimes you need to hit “refresh” to see them all. If I had known about this before the survey started, I would have mentioned it in the ad.

I’m going on 14 weeks pregnant now, which means I’m probably in the highest-energy phase of the pregnancy, and I plan to use it well. Currently, my plan is to leave the survey online until July 15th. Hopefully by then I’ll have a good response. I’m not letting myself worry about this yet, although there are only 4 respondents so far. I can always let it run longer, if needed. Brain Child has been so helpful on this. I really wanted to find some way to locate women who were not only mothers but who really identified strongly as mothers. I contacted all sorts of publications and chat groups, and received only canned or no responses. IVillage even wrote me a cease and desist letter for contacting chat group leaders regarding the possibility of gaining their support in an approach to IVillage. I was pretty much at the point of giving up and trying another project altogether when I thought of BC.

It was sort of obvious, now that I look back. A mom I met and interviewed while developing the survey recommended BC to me as something that “saved her life” after she had spent her first 2 years at home as a SAHM to an as-yet undiagnosed child with autism spectrum disorder. I subscribed immediately, and felt right at home reading it.

I’m going to close for now. But I am making notes to myself in my date book, right now, to update this blog every Thursday from now on. Next week, I think I will post about what my reasons for doing this survey were. So please come back if you like!

Yesterday, I delivered my survey printout, thesis proposal, and a question-by-question defense of the survey instrument to my department chair. He will hopefully review it over the next few days and then I will submit it to the University of Washington’s Institutional Review Board (the IRB). The role of the IRB is to make sure I’m not engaged in exploitative or dangerous research….okay, they have a broader and more nuanced role than that, but I am tired.

Here’s the deal with IRB. I have applied as “exempt,” which means my proposal should not require full review, which can take upwards of 2 months in some cases. My advisor and I agree that the project should be exempt because the survey will be fully anonymous (no identifying information will be collected on respondents) and because it is not likely to inflict harm (physical, psychological) on participants.

At least I am hoping it does not; if you took the survey, you know that there was a screening instrument in there that asked some fairly direct questions on your mood and coping abilities. More discussion on that instrument later, but if for some reason IRB decides that this is too invasive, I may be in trouble. Brain Child is set to print on May 28th, and if I don’t have IRB approval to go ahead with my project by then, I am sunk.

I am trying to not dwell on this, since most everyone I know has found a way to make it work, even if they were working their fingers to the bone and communicating with IRB on minutiae down to the wire. But as it turns out, I am eight weeks pregnant. I am living in that fuzzy-headed, early pregnancy zone where only about half of my daily hours are actually productive. The rest of the time I’m staring into space. Anyhow, the last two, three days have seen me push myself a bit harder than my body wanted to go, and this morning I am paying the price.

Last comment, and it is based on the assumption that all goes well: I hope that there was nothing upsetting to you about taking the survey. There were two portions of it that consisted of standardized instruments — question series that have been studied and validated extensively and shown to provide reliable information on respondent state-of-mind. The problem is, these standardized questionnaires often feel a bit awkward to answer. My goal in designing the survey was to make it interesting and maybe even fun to go through, but I know those questions must have bogged you down. I am sorry about that, but it was important!

Writing a survey for the web is hard work. I’m always looking for errors because one good one could send the whole project down the tubes.

These days on Monday and Wednesday (my designated “survey days”), you’ll often find me in the University of Washington library scribbling notes in my thesis project yellow composition notebook while reading books with titles like: “Mail and Internet Surveys: The Tailored Design Method,” and “Conducting Research Surveys Via E-mail and the Web.” They provide me with advice along the lines of: “research indicates that answers that appear at the top of a scroll box are more likely to be answered positively.” Of course we don’t want that; it would introduce bias. So I won’t do that…heck, I eliminated those dreaded scroll boxes entirely.

If you write for a living or as part of your work, you know how it is. Every time you look at your current project, it needs a little tweak here or there…this is only compounded with a survey. You don’t want to overdo change, but you do want a really streamlined, interesting document. A survey that people will enjoy responding to (I may be pushing it with that, but I do believe it is possible).

To edit your survey, you need to look at it from far away and close up, and generally you can’t wrap your mind around both processes on the same day. So you officially become a geek. You ask your friends to take your survey and let you know if certain questions make sense. Would you find this survey unworkable or offensive in any way if you were a Pacific Islander American mother of two, in the process of divorcing, and living with your parents? Can you take my survey again and again, with little thought to the answers you are providing, just to make sure the program does not crash.

That said, if you are here, it is because you have already taken my survey. Please do not take it again. Once is fine and I hope it worked well for you.

Up next, some thoughts on the differences between online surveys versus the more traditional approaches (ie, mail- or telephone-based).